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Reservoirs and dams in the Commonwealth of Independent States
Industrialization reached Russia later than Western Europe and North America, and one of the few large scale dams dating from the Tsarist era is on the Volkhov near St Petersburg (opened 1926). However with Lenin's declaration Communism is Soviet Power Plus the Electrification of the Whole Country (22 December 1920), dam building began in earnest, to a more functional design. One of the first was the DneproGES (Dnieper Hydroelectric Station) dam on the Dnieper in Ukraine completed in 1932 using US generators. Important for rendering the Dnieper navigable, it was destroyed by the retreating Soviet army in 1941 but rebuilt along with many new dams in the post-war period. The Dnieper now has six major hydroelectric dams and the larger Volga river has nine, each up to 50m high with shipping locks and generating up to 3000MW. In the post-war period, Soviet engineers rose to new challenges, not only designing dams in Soviet Central Asia and Siberia which are among the largest in the world, but also advising on schemes around the world, notably the Aswan Dam and many schemes in China. Today, dams in the new Central Asian Republics are of particular significance: the electricity they produce represent badly-needed natural resource, while the control of scarce water may prove a source of conflict. Recent political and economic turmoil has put several projects years behind schedule and some of those completed are being poorly maintained, potentially dangerously so. The former USSR now has a total hydroelectric capacity of around 60,000MW, about 20% of electricity use (varying from 0% in Belarus to 89% in Georgia). The larger dams are tabulated below. Name River/Reservoir Height Length Power Type Date Volkhov Volkhov 11m 212m 83MW Gravity 1926 Dneprovsk Dnieper 60m 760m 1300MW Gravity 1932 Volgograd¹ Volga 47m 3974m 2500MW Earth/Rock Fill 1960 Irkutsk Angara River/Lake Baikal 44m 2500m 650MW Earth Fill 1956 Bratsk Angara River-Oka-Iya³ 124m 4417m 4500MW Earth Fill/Gravity 1967 Ust-Ilimsk Angara River-Ilim 105m 3725m 4300MW Earthfill/Gravity 1974 Boguchany² Angara River 79m 1816m 4000MW Rock Fill Sayano-Shushenskaya Yenisei 242m 1066m 6400MW Arch/Gravity 1989 Krasnoyarsk (Divnogorsk) Yenisei 119m 1065m 6000MW Gravity 1968 Zeya Zeya (Russian Far East) 115m 758m 1290MW Buttress 1975 Bureya² Bureya (Russian Far East) 139m 810m 2000MW Gravity Chirkey Sulak (Dagestan) 230m 333m 1000MW Arch 1977 Nurek Vakhsh (Tajikistan) 300m 704m 3000MW Earth Fill 1980 Rogun² Vakhsh (Tajikistan) 335m 660m 3600MW Earth/Rock Fill Ingurskaya Inguri (Georgia) 270m 680m 1250MW Arch 1984 Toktogul Naryn (Kyrgyzstan) 215m 293m 1200MW Gravity 1978 ¹Several dams this size on the Volga. ²Still under construction. ³At 169km³, the "Dragon Lake" is the world's largest artificial reservoir (until Three Gorges Dam is operational). Since the 1930s, most of the dam design in the USSR (and, later, in independent Russia) has been conducted by the design institute that since 1957 has been known as Hydroproject. External links *Chirkey Dam photo *Bratsk Dam photo *Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam photo *Central Asia - Further Reading Russia and CIS Category:Reservoirs Russia and CIS * Reservoirs